Flexible Automation and Integrated Manufacturing 1998

ISBN Print: 978-1-56700-118-1

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONVENTIONAL AND CONCURRENT ENGINEERING

DOI: 10.1615/FAIM1998.160
pages 183-191

Résumé

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a complex method of designing and manufacturing. It covers designing, process planning, prototyping, pilot lot and manufacturing. CE allows to shorten the process planning time, better use of technical equipment, and increase quality of the product. It allows also to avoid the mistakes which very often occur in the conventional method, where the designing takes place before the process planning. As it is shown by the research carried out, CE requires methodological approach taking into account the complexity and parallelism of realized planning activities. There are very often feedback signals between particular activities.
In the paper, the differences between both these methods, conventional and concurrent are analyzed. Especially the requirements of CE imposed on the approach of the designers, hardware and software are highlighted. First, the sequence of design activities for the both methods is given in the form of the algorithms. In the algorithms, the main stages of the design and process planning procedures are presented. The particular stages of CE structure have been assigned formalized methods like FMA, QFD, DFA, DFM which are applied during their realization. Next, the algorithm of CE method is presented in more detail, taking into consideration the localization of the separate stages in the time domain.
The presented analysis allows:
to extract the particular activities and present them in the form of separate modules,
to take into account the links between them
to develop the model of a computer aided system based on CE method.